The Skritch Deep

The reeking heart of the Skritch Warren — a goblin-cut cave network bone-floored and lamp-lit, with something older than the Gnash-King denning at the very bottom.

The Skritch Deep goes down further than any of the warren's own goblins will say, lit by stolen lamps and floored with bone. Up top it reads as a straightforward infestation — a teeming tide of skulkers and cutters, cowards in any single body and a swarm in numbers, held together past their own fear by the Gnash-King, the largest tooth the hills have grown in a generation. He holds court above the descent-throat and has his boast painted on every upper wall: one great goblin standing over a ring of lamps, fist raised, master of the dark. But he never paints it near the throat.

The lamps are the tell. Goblins see fine in the dark; they do not light a warren to see by. The lamps crowd thickest exactly where there is nothing worth guarding — around the throat, past which the whole place goes quiet — because the light is a fence, and the fence keeps something in. Past the lamps the only goblin scripture is daubed over and over in soot and blood: a ring of lamps, the dark beyond it, a hand held up. Not past the lamps.

Below the throat the offerings begin — coin, filed teeth, spilled oil — and the deeper a hand digs the older and richer they get, until the goblin junk gives way to bronze no goblin ever minted and marks cut in a hand that echoes the sealing-walls of Vallen's Barrow. Something was fed here long before the warren came and found the mouth already open. The goblins did what the frightened do: they fed it, and called the feeding theirs. What the Gnash-King will not admit, and what no outlander has climbed back out to confirm, is that he is not the strongest thing in his own deep — only the loudest thing this side of the lamps.